The Humanoid Race

It was an astounding request. A year ago, neuroscientist Mitsuo Kawato called on the Japanese government to commit 50 billion yen ($446 million) a year for the next three decades. The dream: an Apollo-like program to build a robot with the mental, physical, and emotional capabilities of a 5-year-old child. Kawato called his plan the Atom Project, named for the popular postwar cartoon Tetsuwan Atom (known as Astroboy in the US), the story of a superhero boy robot.

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Today the Atom Project remains little more than an audacious proposal. But the science behind it is quite real. With each advance in computing speed, battery capacity, camera and motor miniaturization, and software capability, the world grows closer to the ultimate goal of robotics: a walking, talking, feeling android worthy of our cinematic inspirations.

Consider the progress of just the past 15 years. There are now robots that can get around on two legs, participate in simple conversations, and manipulate objects in rudimentary ways. Of course, we don't yet have a bot that can navigate downtown Manhattan, tie its shoelaces, or even tell a chair from a desk. MIT's Cynthia Breazeal holds out hope that within five years, robots will cross a critical threshold, becoming partners rather than tools – in other words, we'll have friends, not appliances. And while there are a number of extremely complex problems to solve before we can make something as advanced as Sonny, the star of I, Robot, we're getting there, one piece at a time. To find out where the state of the art lies, Wired surveyed the projects that might one day add up to an android just like the rest of us.

MUSCLES

TRON-X: Festo AG specializes in assembly-line robots – the kind that build cars, construct PCs, and pack microwave dinners into little cardboard boxes. To show off its skill at building air-powered machines, the company made Tron-X, an android given life by 200 pneumatic cylinders. By finely controlling the air pumping through Tron-X's tubes, operators can command it to dance, change facial expressions, and make complicated hand gestures.

EWA-1: To encourage artificial-muscle development, next year Nasa JPL will host the Arm Wrestling Grand Challenge – a competition pitting robots against human world champions. The bot favorite: EWA-1, from Environmental Robots. Its strength comes from six internal conductive graphite fiber bundles. Pump 120 volts into the array and chemicals on the fibers cause them to contract – helping put the synthetic arm over the top. – Brian Lam

HANDS

SHADOW HAND: For eight years, the Shadow Robot Company has been trying to develop a device capable of replicating the human hand's 25 individual movements while keeping true to form. Founder Richard Greenhill says Shadow has trumped larger R&D organizations like NASA and the German Space Agency, both of which failed to get so many complex actions into such a small package.

ACT HAND: The Anatomically Correct Testbed hand also aims to imitate human anatomy. Its bones mimic ours, the joints provide the same range of motion and stiffness as human joints, and for control it relies on signals that emulate neural commands from the brain. While the goal is to build a full hand, researchers at Carnegie Mellon have completed only one finger. – Xeni Jardin

EXPRESSION

WE-4R: It's everything you might feel in a typical workday: fear, anger, surprise, joy, disgust, sadness – or a Zen-like state of peace. WE-4R can express all seven of these emotions; it can also see, hear, touch, and smell. A team at Japan's Waseda University created the bot to study the ways that senses translate into emotions. The researchers want to develop a mathematical model for how external stimuli trigger emotional reactions. – X.J.

LIPS

PARTNER ROBOT: The trumpet is one of the most physically taxing musical instruments. Unlike the saxophone or clarinet, it lacks vibrating reeds, requiring a player to use his lips and breath to differentiate one note from another. Such is the hurdle cleared by Toyota's Partner, a trumpet-playing bot that the company claims has the deftness of Louis Armstrong. When it comes to detailing the specifics of its design, however, Toyota's lips are sealed.

VERA: David Hanson, a University of Texas at Dallas doctoral candidate, has created a skin substitute that mimics the elasticity of our natural epidermis. Made from platinum-cured silicone, Hanson's novel material is less dense and more pliable than foam-rubber polymers. The result: His android Vera's face can change expressions with around 1�20 the force required by previous synthetic skins – a big step toward making robotic smiles more lifelike.

ROBOVIE IIS: A project of Japan's Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, Robovie is an android with sensitive skin. Metalized piezoelectric film sheets in the robot's silicone outer layer generate voltage when touched. If someone gently taps Robovie on the shoulder, it will turn and ask, "Yes?" in Japanese. But if poked or hit, Robovie exclaims, "Ow!" and examines where it was struck. Talk about touchy-feely. – B.I.K. and B.A.

EYES

HIGH-SPEED BATTING BOT: Meet Japan's latest contribution to besuboru: the first robot that can hit major-league heat. That's hard enough for humans, who have predictive algorithms hardwired into their visual cortex from millennia spent dodging fanged animals. The University of Tokyo's batting bot achieves this evolutionary feat by relying on visual frame rates that would make a Quake addict drool – 1,000 fps, or about 30 times the flicker in a videogame or movie.

JERRY: To get an idea of what it's looking at, Jerry, a research robot at MIT, imitates the way humans rely on contextual clues to make fast and accurate visual guesses. First Jerry looks for large-scale hints like the distance to the horizon, identifies its surroundings – a street or an office, say – and then decides whether a car or a couchis blocking his path. Researchers call this technique "using the forest to see the trees." – Lucas Graves

EARS

SIG2: SIG2 has one of the most advanced auditory systems in the world – yet surprisingly cheap ears. Developed by Kyoto University and the Kitano Symbiotic Systems Project, SIG2 is outfitted with silicone pinnae (the visible portion of the ear) that are sold to medical schools for about $90 each. These appendages are attached to an aural filtering system, which gives SIG the ability to understand three people speaking at the same time.

ROBITA: Robita doesn't just hear; it listens. Combining language processing, advanced speech and face recognition, and the ability to separate multiple sound sources and to speak, Waseda University's convobot can hold its own at a cocktail party. When it recognizes voices, Robita joins the discussion by facing the speaker. And when it hears something that goes against its knowledge or preprogrammed opinion, Robita can interrupt and object.

PaPeRo: Developed at NEC's Multimedia Research Laboratories, PaPeRo (partner-type personal robot) is the world's first bilingual bot. Thanks to NEC's high-speed speech recognition system, PaPeRo can understand 25,000 English and 50,000 Japanese words. What's more, PaPeRo's "detection-based feedback system" lets the speaker know if it is having difficulty hearing. When there's a racket, PaPeRo may say, "It's noisy." – B.A.

NOSE

RAT: The Reactive Autonomous Testbed, a creation of Aussie researcher Andy Russell at Monash University, is a "smellbot" that can successfully follow odorous trails through a maze. Human noses are still about a million times more sensitive to scents than the 4-inch-long Rat, and dog snouts can beat it by a factor of around 100 million. But this sniffing machine can be programmed to follow specific chemicals – and never gets stuffed up. – X.J.

STOMACH

ECOBOT: Imagine feeding table scraps to a bot instead of to Spot. Researchers at the University of the West of England in Bristol are working on "gastrobots" that are powered by internal digestive tracts. Their current project, EcoBot, is a device that, like a fourth grader, gets quick energy from sugar. The juice it generates won't power Madison Square Garden, but it enables the 2-pound bot to move at a blistering pace of 8 feet per hour. – Chris Baker

LEGS

HONDA ASIMO: Honda started work on its walker in 1986 and unveiled the first untethered humanoid robot 10 years later. Today, dozens of Asimos enthrall crowds by navigating stairs and walking a figure eight. Its fancy footwork relies on a vast array of internal sensors, and a built-in gyroscope keeps ASIMO steady, enabling it to walk circles around the competition.

SONY QRIO: Armed with sophisticated movement software and highly tuned motors, Sony's pint-size Qrio has both lifelike motion and a range of impressive skills. It can run, stand on one foot, and get up after a fall. To help Qrio adapt to unpredictable surfaces, engineers outfitted its soles with multiple sensors. If the floor isn't perfectly flat when Qrio plants a foot, the sensors override the preprogrammed commands.

TROODY: MIT AI Lab veteran Peter Dilworth specializes in robotic resistance walking: the process of making artificial limbs move until they encounter a certain amount of resistance, rather than reach a predetermined position. His machines – a series of robotic dinosaurs – push their feet down until they feel the ground. Dilworth's dinobots maintain enough resistance to stay upright in the most uneven terrain. – Joshua Davis